To read Peter Straub is a disconcerting experience, one which begins even before the first line.

First, there is the difficulty of defining what, precisely, Straub does. The New York writer is often referred to as one of our finest horror writers, a definition which certainly applies, but one which doesn’t go nearly far enough. Certainly there are elements of horror in Straub’s fiction — his most famous novel, after all, is entitled Ghost Story, a genuinely chilling, classic piece of work — but there are also elements of fantasy and fairy tale; postmodern approaches to narrative and magic realism; keen-eyed observation of family and other relationships. It’s impossible to know where you stand, or what to expect.

The opening of any given novel or story further exacerbates this disconcerting feeling. Within a few sentences, most readers will have been won over by the steady ease of Straub’s voice, feeling an almost immediate sense of security and comfort in the hands of the storytelling. That easy confidence, however, gives way to a dizzying sense of possibility: the stories don’t unfold as we might expect, leaving us hovering over the page, leaning forward, our comfort giving way to a deep-seated anxiety.

It’s an intoxicating, and rare, reading experience.

The stories selected for Straub’s new collection, Interior Darkness, will serve as a perfect introduction for readers unfamiliar with Straub’s work, and as a reminder to his longtime readers that, yes, he is an even better writer than even the glossiest of memories will allow.

Interior Darkness begins with tales of childhood. “Blue Rose,” which serves as a prequel to Straub’s celebrated Blue Rose trilogy of novels, is a slow-building nightmare of a Midwestern boyhood, of lives locked in a cycle of abuse, of the violence that can arise between siblings. There are scenes of pure, chilling terror here, physical violence recounted with a clear, calm precision, which adds to the intensity of the acts themselves, but it is the unseen, the internal and psychological ramifications which are all the more unsettling. Similarly, “The Juniper Tree,” which documents a child’s escape into the darkness of a movie house, and the horrors he finds there, is chilling in the moment, but it is the repercussions of those events, and how they shape the life of the child, that will haunt the reader.

That intersection, between art and the real world, is key to many of Straub’s stories, including “The Buffalo Hunter,” which chronicles the birth of a new obsession for 35-year-old Bob Bunting, an obsession which opens doorways into the books which he is reading, with a variety of tragic results. Similarly, “Pork Pie Hat,” one of the strongest stories in the collection, revolves around the memories of an aging jazz saxophonist, and the horror he experienced one Halloween which has shaped his life since. Straub — a longtime jazz aficionado — writes as compellingly of the music as he does of the boy’s journey into The Backs, a forbidden community out in the woods. It’s a story as beautiful as it is harrowing, as stirring as it is terrifying.

Among the other highlights of the collection are “Mr. Clubb and Mr. Cuff,” in which a rich New York businessman hires two “detectives” to take revenge on his wife for her infidelity. By now, you might be expecting things to go awry — they always do in a Straub story — but just how awry they go, and how far Straub takes the tale, defies belief, even after reading. Similarly, “The Ballad of Ballard and Sandrine,” in which we meet a pair of longtime lovers aboard a river cruise in the Amazon, begins to fold into itself, layers of dreamlike reality (or realistic dreams?) brushing against each other, bleeding into one another, as the narrative shifts back and forth through the course of their relationship before finally opening up into an ending so horrific it taps into something primal within the reader.

It would be easy to list off the highlights of Interior Darkness: it’s a collection of marvellous depth, with only rare missteps. Better you should read it for yourself. Yes, there are scenes which will make your skin crawl. Yes, there is horror here. But more than that, there is truth and insight, writing that will make you dizzy, and question the texture of the world around you.

Victoria writer Robert J. Wiersema is the author of several novels, including Before I Wake and Bedtime Story.

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